Photoshop is a tricky beast, in part one Scratch that! , I talked about using a scratch disk to help improve performance. If you did that, you’ve probably already noticed an improvement, but why not try for more.

Just a bit more on scratch disks. If you run shy on space on your scratch disk try limiting the number of history states.  Photoshop is by nature destructive in the editing process, but the history states save your previous actions in non destructive form. To reduce, or add history states goto the History Log (Edit->preferences->History Log). Ok before I forget lets talk about RAM.

If you already have maximized the physical amount of RAM in your system, you may not have it properly allocated. As in, it might physically be in your computer, but Photoshop can’t use it. First step seems obvious, but… I’m guilty myself… if you have other programs open, close them. Don’t stream Netflix on that second monitor, while checking email and browsing the internet, and editing on Photoshop. If you are getting out of RAM errors it could be the other open programs. If everything is closed then you’ll need to upgrade your RAM to get the performance you want.

In my pc I have 64GB of RAM, I’m maxed out physically but can still tweak some settings. from the same place as scratch disks, (edit->preferences->performance) you can bring up the following screen.

Improving performance  could be as simple as adjusting the memory allocation. To use more RAM slide towards + less RAM … I’ll let you figure that one out. You could also assign a physical number in the Let Photoshop use box. In theory if all other programs are closed you could set to 100% and let Photoshop use all available RAM.

While were on the performance tab select Use Graphics Processor, and based on the descriptions select the drawing mode that suits your needs. Selecting OpenCL should also help.

With such a variety of graphics cards I can’t really say much on this.. so that’s it for today.

Let me know what you want to see.